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A baseball-sized piece of a comet lit up the sky on Monday night
(Sept. 9), becoming a brilliant fireball that streaked over the
southeastern United States.

The small fragment of a comet disintegrated 3 seconds after
hitting Earth's atmosphere when it was about 25 miles (40
kilometers) above Woodstock, Ala., according to NASA officials
who tracked the fireball. NASA cameras positioned at the space
agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.,
recorded
videos of the fireball whizzing through the sky.

The meteor was speeding at a blistering 76,000 mph (122,310 km/h)
when it entered the atmosphere. Skywatchers on the ground heard
sonic booms because the cometary debris deeply penetrated the
atmosphere, Bill Cooke, head of the Meteoroid Environments Office
at Marshall wrote in a blog post. [ See
more photos of the baseball-size meteor fireball ]

"Fireballs like this occur all the time over the planet," Cooke
told SPACE.com via email. "However … our cameras in the Southeast
pick up a bright fireball like this every month or so. We
detected an even brighter event over Tennessee two weeks back."

People all over the Southeast who happened to be looking skyward
Monday night were treated to the cosmic show. Concertgoers
watching a Mumford & Sons show in an amphitheater in Pelham,
Ala. saw the flash, and observers in Georgia also claimed to have
seen the fireball streak past.

According to a post from the
American Meteor Society written Tuesday, more than 250 people
reported witnessing the fireball. Observers in Mississippi, North
Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Kentucky all
claimed to see the flash of light.

The fireball was 15 times brighter than the planet Venus, and its
flash of light rivaled that of the waxing crescent moon, NASA
officials said. The meteor was not a part of any known
meteor shower and its orbit took it far past Jupiter like
many comets.

Although the celestial debris created an amazing fireball, there
are probably not any meteorites on the ground because the fragile
piece of comet was moving too quickly as it entered the
atmosphere, Cooke said.

On Aug. 28, six cameras operated by NASA caught sight of one of
the brightest fireballs captured by the network in five years.
The asteroid responsible for the brilliant show weighed more than
100 pounds and was about 2 feet wide (0.7 meters). In certain
areas, the meteor was 20 times brighter than the full moon.

Editor's note: If you snapped an amazing photo
of the fireball or any other night sky view that you'd like to
share for a possible story or image gallery, please send images
and comments, including equipment used, to managing editor Tariq
Malik at spacephotos@space.com.